As soon as the mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears. Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?”
Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. “Dinner?”
He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends. Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.
Described in guidebooks as “a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England”, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, museumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.
Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.
“Madam! Please, madam!”
In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black—thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. “Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msuri sana. Please, madam! I have six children and they are so hungry …”
The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.
“I don’t—” she fumbled. “I’m travelling, I can’t—”
“Please, madam!”
The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.
Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“I shouldn’t have,” she confessed woefully. “He wouldn’t go away.”
“There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no. Most children learn it before the age of two.”
“This is just what I need,” she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. “A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.”
“You haven’t changed,” Calvin lamented.
Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.
Calvin decided for them both. “The game,” he announced, “is delectable.” His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.
“So,” he began. “You’re still so passionate?”
She blushed. “In what regard?”
“About your work,” he amended. “The underprivileged and oppressed and that.”
“If you mean have I become jaded—”
“Like me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“I said. But it’s hard to picture you jaded.”
“I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn’t make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you’ve gotten wise, that you’ve caught the world on, when really you’ve just gotten mean.”
“You think I’m mean?”
“You were, a little,” she admitted. “At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—‘fecund hordes’?”
He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, “You still don’t have a sense of humour.”
“I don’t see why it’s always so hilarious to believe in something.”
“Why didn’t you tell me to sod off?”
“Because when people are wicked to me, I don’t get angry, I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I’m harmless.”
“It’s harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can’t you learn to fight back?”
“I hate fighting. I’d rather go away.”
They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here. Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.
“I should feel lucky,” said Calvin. “Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don’t reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.”
“What about development?”
“Develop into what, mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.”
“It’s seen plenty of that.” Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.
“Not enough. I’d remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gas-guzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.” Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. “Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.”
“Back to the garden,” Eleanor mused.
“You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960 this country was paradise.” He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. “No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.”
“Don’t you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?”
“What knocks them out is it’s grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn’t special. But when I came here it was. So there’s nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it’s every man’s right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.”
Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. “You sound like a child who’s had his playground closed.”
“Don’t imagine I’m reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working smoothly.”
“Well,” ventured Eleanor cautiously, “Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don’t they?”
Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.
“Then, you should be happy,” Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. “Most Africans have